[discussion] Aren't parking garages a decent way to consolidate parking as densely as possible? Why the hate?
[discussion] Aren't parking garages a decent way to consolidate parking as densely as possible? Why the hate?
First off, I want to point out that I am totally on team /c/fuckcars. I highly believe in transit, walking, and biking.
That being said, I think it's fair to say that:
- Cars aren't fully going away anytime soon
- Even in our wildest dreams, it still makes sense for cars to be usable in some way, just that the other transport methods are highly prioritized.
So the discussion I want to have is about parking garages, and the hate I see towards them from the urbanist community.
I feel like parking garages vaguely align with urbanist views, because they are high density, and they allow someone to drive to a general area after which they can do the rest of their transportation via other methods.
To put it into perspective, I'd rather have 1-3 dense parking garages in a neighborhood than have street parking along all the roads plus wide open parking lots around grocery stores and whatnot.
I understand this is a lesser of the two evils discussion but it seems to me like parking garages are the clear winner.
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There are good parking garages and bad parking garages. What makes a good parking garage? I'd say good garages must be:
- Located away from attractions and venues. The garage should not operate as a way to funnel cars into a popular area but rather as a way to store cars for those unfortunate enough to be unable to arrive by alternative means.
- Located close to public transit. The garage should operate as a gateway into a local community, hence should have access to bike paths, trains and trams, buses, etc to carry their passengers into a community.
- Be priced to cover the garage cost. Garages are expensive and the hourly/daily fees with average occupancy should pay for the garage in 10 to 15 years.
- A tool to remove on-street parking and minimum parking requirements.
Bad garages are ones that break the good rules. They are:
- Are free or too cheap to pay off their construction cost and land value in a reasonable time period.
- Located inside downtown areas.
- A method to increase the capacity of car storage in downtowns.
It's also possible for a good garage to become a bad one. Say a small town installs a parking lot on the edge of town, but then the town grows. That lot should be removed due to the increased land value it occupies. The new medium sized town can consider adding a parking lot or garage again, but certainly not in their popular, profitable, and active downtown.
Be priced to cover the garage cost. Garages are expensive and the hourly/daily fees with average occupancy should pay for the garage in 10 to 15 years.
I really disagree with this one. As stated, there are good uses of garages and not so good, but pricing is the easiest incentive to encourage or discourage. We should price by the goal we wan to achieve.
- park-n-ride is generally something we want to encourage so parking should be cheap or free
- driving into city center should be discouraged so parking should be expensive enough to encourage people to find better options
That's a fair position to take, and thank you for debating. Have an upvote!
I don't think park-and-ride should be made artificially cheap or free because that causes demand to drive to the town edges. Regional transit is needed and is already competing with subsidized highways. We don't need more subsidies that induce even more regional car demand!
Besides, even with charging for the lost costs, park-and-ride is going to be cheaper over inner-city parking. Let me clarify my point of the cost of a garage: the cost of building a garage includes materials, maintenance, enforcement, and land value. City edge land is cheap to the point that park-and-ride probably won't be built as a garage but as a lot. Engineered buildings are expensive and usually only make sense when the land value is very high. I suspect it's only a million or two to build a paved, ~200 spot park-and-ride, which would place daily spot pricing on the order of $1.50 to $2.50 a day. That's pretty cheap compared to privately owned garaged parking in major cities (> $25 a day).
My pricing beef orbits around how often city garages are heavily subsidized. I'll make a real-life example from a nearby city of 64,000 people. They built a garage adjacent to their downtown for $12 million. Amortizing that over 15 years and the number of spaces puts the minimum revenue per spot at $8.98 per day. What is the city's going rate for parking? $40 per month for a permit and $1.25 an hour with 9 hours of enforcement. Only the hourly rate at 100% occupancy, which this lot is not generating, meets just the construction costs, let alone figuring out discount rate and property taxes.
And speaking of taxes, I expect publicly built parking lots and garages to also pay for their taxable rate, even if it's just an accounting trick by the city to price their lots. Running local property taxes as a land value tax would go a long way towards properly pricing the value of public garages. LVT would also discourage parking in the city center, where land is expensive, in favor of parking on the city edge, where land is cheap. Just another trick which drives down park-and-ride pricing and discourages city-center parking.
Especially your last paragraph I think is the key. We can't top-down dictate and micromanage all city planning. Rather, we should strive to implement a tax and zoning system such that things are done or not done according to their true costs. So long as we tax land appropriately, reform our insane land use policies (e.g., parking minimums), and tax externalities correctly (e.g., vehicle weight, congestion pricing, carbon, etc.), we should be able to just let the economy run, and the market will reveal where and when it makes sense to build parking garages and parking lots.
Personally, I suspect what we'll discover in the long run is parking, in all its forms, rarely makes financial sense.